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Backcountry San Diego and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
For generations, this vast desert landscape has been a setting for Native American history, early exploration and migration, ranching, transportation, and settlement. Its significance is not confined to individual buildings or archaeological sites. The roads, trails, mountains, vistas, ranches, water sources, and open spaces together form a cultural landscape, and its meaning depends upon its enduring integrity.
That integrity is now threatened by SDG&E’s proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink, a 500-kilovolt transmission project that would run for approximately 150 miles, from the Imperial Valley to Orange County. The project is in its early planning and environmental-review stages, and no final route has been selected.
In essence, what is being proposed is an industrial corridor through an enormous historic landscape of great beauty and significance. The preferred route and alternatives under consideration would cross or adversely affect the Anza-Borrego region and the iconic Warner–Carrillo Ranch House (1857) in Warner Springs.
Picture massive intrusions of industrial blight into pristine nature: Steel transmission towers rising to 200 feet. New access roads. Construction areas. Long-term maintenance corridors. These impacts would not end when construction crews leave.
Historic resources derive much of their meaning and impact from their setting. San Diego’s age-old trails, mountains, open desert, and expansive views are not mere empty spaces between historic sites; they are part of the resource.
For generations, Warner–Carrillo Ranch House and the ocean of land that surrounds it have remained remarkably free of the intensive development that has transformed so much of Southern California. In increasingly rare ways, visitors can still experience the relationship between the historic ranch house, the open range and the broader Warner Valley. Looking across an unspoiled horizon largely unchanged by time is an unparalleled experience.
Today, this is the only place that visitors can still stand where generations of travelers got their first glimpse of the “promised land” after crossing hundreds of miles along the Southern Emigrant Trail. The landscape retains the physical traces of that journey, with thousands of wagon wheels having rutted the open range along the historic route.
To introduce industrial-scale transmission infrastructure into this setting—one of California’s most authentic and significant historic landscapes—would destroy a vista and personal experience that could never be recreated.
The same deep concern extends beyond Warner–Carrillo Ranch to Eagle Rock, historic trails, cultural landscapes, Indigenous rock art sites, and other resources throughout and surrounding Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. These places are interconnected; their significance cannot be understood by treating each one as an isolated point on a map.
The California Public Utilities Commission will ultimately review the Powerlink project and determine its proposed route using a regulatory and environmental-review process. The project will also be evaluated through the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), including consideration of cultural resources, tribal cultural resources, visual impacts, recreation, special management designations, and other environmental factors.
The gargantuan project’s consequences may extend beyond the immediate right-of-way. SOHO is very concerned that major transmission corridors can facilitate additional industrial development in previously undeveloped landscapes. [link to SOHO letters under What You Can Do?] SDG&E’s Sunrise Powerlink set a precedent and, in fact, more harmful development followed.
California's energy needs will change. Transmission technologies will change. Routes and infrastructure plans will change. But once a landscape that has escaped centuries of change is fundamentally altered, we cannot simply put it back.
What You Can Do
- Now is the time to speak up. Public action and letters can make a difference. Opportunities for public comment will continue as the project moves into formal regulatory and environmental review. SOHO suggests you become familiar with the project and track its progress and timelines online at Golden Pacific PowerLink
- Strongly oppose any Golden Pacific PowerLink route through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
- Likewise, oppose routes that would damage the historic setting and viewsheds of the Warner–Carrillo Ranch House, Eagle Rock, and other historic resources in the area.
- Contact your state senator, assemblymember, county supervisor, and other elected representatives and urge them to protect the entire Anza-Borrego region and its historic resources from PowerLink.
- Submit your comments to SDG&E while their project is still being shaped.
(Scroll to view more photos)
 Photo by Gina Norte
 Photo by Laurie Roberts
 Courtesy SOHO
 Courtesy Anza-Borrego Foundation
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